Friday, September 16, 2011

The World's Biggest Army? Guess.

The following came to me as an email from a friend. I cleaned it up a bit since it is one of those forwarded emails with some errors in spelling and structure.

This one probably has made the rounds but it's one I have not seen before.

The world's largest army... America 's hunters! Think about this....

A blogger added up the deer license sales in just a handful of states and arrived at a striking conclusion: There were over 600,000 hunters last season in the state of Wisconsin.

Allow me to restate that number.

Last season, Wisconsin 's hunters became the eighth largest army in the world.

More men under arms than in Iran.

More than in France and Germany combined.

These men deployed to the woods of a single American state to hunt with firearms, and no one was killed.

That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and Michigan 's 700,000 hunters, all of whom returned safely home.

Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia and it literally establishes the fact that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

The point?

America will forever be safe from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower.

Hunting -- it's not just a way to fill the freezer.It's a matter of national security.

That's why all enemies, foreign and domestic, want to see us disarmed.

Fact check: Many states issue multiple deer tags per hunter so license sales listed above may be a bit misleading. What isn't counted are general hunting licenses, upland game bird stamps, waterfowl stamps and turkey tags.

Still, add to those numbers the multitude of gun owners who do not hunt such as the collectors, the competition shooters, the hobbyists, those carrying for personal protection (men and women) and those who have armed their homes. That's still a lot of personal firepower. Damn. Brings a tear to my eye.